At present, vision guided intelligent robotic systems are adapted to perform wide variety of challenging tasks which only a skilled human operator or player can perform. One popular application attempted by several researchers/Engineers is to build robots that can compete with a human player in the field of games/sports. Robots such as chess playing robots, ping-pong playing robots, pool/billiards playing robots, somersaulting robots, soccer playing robots and so on are the example of robots being used in games or sports. Such robots are usually used as practicing/training/playing/skill-testing partners by professional and amateur sports persons and organizations. Further, such robotics designs bring out the best of engineering and technology skills of the inventor and helps in the evolution of the technology. Technologies developed in such endeavors often find applications in various Industrial and real-life applications also, making the inventions all the more meaningful.
CAROM is one of the popular board game in the world. The objective of game is to use a striker disk with a flick of the finger to make contact with and move lighter and darker object disks, which are thus propelled into corner pockets. The game allows maximum of four players to play the game at a time and get entertained. A human player playing the carom game requires sharp eyes, steady hands, good hand-eye coordination skills, ability to make intelligent shot selection, ability to think ahead/think into the future and so in order to succeed in this game. While adopting vision guided intelligent robotic systems in to the game of carom, organizing all these features/skills into a robot system at an economical cost is a very big challenge. Hence there is a need to develop smart methods and apparatus to bring down the complexity of the system and at the same time to make the system more intelligent & accurate.
Further, at present, there is no well documented attempt at building a CAROM playing robot. Although, there have been a few attempts in the field of Pool/Billiards Playing robots, the conventional Pool/Billiards Playing robots are not as efficient as desired when it comes to playing the game of carom. In conventional robots, the degree of freedom of various elements is not suitable for playing carom. For instance, the degree of freedom of an end-effect or in conventional robot is limited only to striking, whereas the game of carom requires the robot to strike the striker from different angle. Furthermore, global camera used in conventional robots for obtaining image of the billiard board, is installed such that “the global camera is looking down on the table and the camera's image plane is substantially parallel to the playing surface”.
This configuration poses severe limitations in terms of visibility of the entire board to the global camera. The global cameras view is often likely to be blocked by the gantry and end-effect or system of the robot. Further, this requires the gantry to be repositioned to one extreme side of the table after each shot, in order to obtain a clear view of the board.
Further, in conventional robots, a local camera's image plane is parallel to the cue axis. This again presents complications in terms of camera mounting and calibration of the system.
Therefore, there is a need for a method and apparatus for providing a carom playing robot that could reduce the system complexity and the cost at the same time maintaining the desired accuracy. Further, there is need for a system and method for providing a carom playing robot that could obviate above mentioned drawbacks of existing robots.